Forget Facebook Friends, New App Lets You Name 'Enemies'

Created as 'a kind of social media blasphemy' by a team of developers led by self-proclaimed transmedia artist and technologist Dean Terry, EnemyGraph tracks 'social dissonance' on Facebook.

A new Facebook app called EnemyGraph lets users designate other Facebookers, companies, brands, places, and anything else they choose as an "enemy," all in the service of tracking what the app's creators call "social dissonance" on the site.

"Most social networks attempt to connect people based on affinitiesyou like a certain band or film or sports team, I like them, therefore we should be friends," Terry wrote about the app in a blog post introducing it. "But people are also connected and motivated by things they dislike. Alliances are created, conversations are generated, friendships are stressed, stretched, and/or enhanced."

The purpose of EnemyGraph, according to its creators, is to run "dissonance queries" that run precisely counter to the attempts to quantify affinities between Facebook users run by the company itself. Though Terry said his group's intent was to create "a critique the social philosophy of Facebook," the EnemyGraph development team has discovered that "[t]he ironic thing isand this is a byproduct of the project rather than the intentionwe are generating a whole new set of personal data that could potentially be mined," Terry wrote.

One critique of the project that springs to mind is the potential for EnemyGraph to be used to potentially escalate cyberbullying, particularly amongst younger Facebook users. Terry doesn't address this specific scenario, but does say that the app is an opt-in propositionyou have to be friends with somebody and also have opted in to EnemyGraph to be listed as their "enemy." The developers "will also monitor the app closely for abuse," Terry said.

EnemyGraph currently displays the top-listed enemies of users of the app, as well as "trending enemies" that users have named frequently in recent days. For the record, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is currently the leading enemy of EnemyGraph users, with 276 designations, narrowly edging out the homophobic, funeral-picketing Westboro Baptist Church, which has been listed by 247 users of the app.

Fox News, Justin Bieber, and Internet Explorer round out the Top 5 on the EnemyGraph list.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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